Definitely Not Diet Food

Deborah Braun and her son, Miles, started Posh Pies in February and are already delivering more than 100 all-natural pies a week — in flavors like apple caramel, strawberry vanilla, and blueberry lemon — along with a series of meat pies reminiscent of Ms. Braun’s English upbringing.
Morgan McGivern

Posh Pies, a company started by Deborah Braun and her son, Miles, both Water Mill residents, offers mostly organic, 100 percent natural pies of every ilk one can imagine and some one can’t — Southwestern chicken pot pie, strawberry vanilla, Dutch cocoa almond, blueberry lemon, apple caramel, jerk chicken with a corn crust, Moroccan lamb, and many more.
Ms. Braun, the culinary mastermind behind the crusty morsels, has a mega background in food, from private parties and events with her South Fork catering business Consuming Passion to her “day job” as the corporate chef and research and development manager for the Hain Celestial Group, headquartered in Melville.
“For years people have been saying to me, ‘I love your pies,’ ” said the British-born piemaker at breakfast last week. When a catering client referred to Ms. Braun’s two-inch “pop-in-your-mouth” pies as being “posh,” the name stuck.
“I thought ‘Posh Pies’ had a nice ring to it,” Ms. Braun said. Her pies are, for the most part, traditionally sized, but she and her 24-year-old son fill special orders as well, and produce two-inch and four-inch pies, along with upscale versions of the sausage rolls and Cornish pasties Ms. Braun ate as a child.
Her work at Hain Celestial, along with previous ownership of her own restaurant in a London health spa and her interest in healthy cuisine, has led Ms. Braun to seek out all-natural ingredients “and local wherever possible.” All the products are entirely free of genetic modification, and her meat pies are antibiotic and hormone free. There are also gluten-free versions of many of the pies.
Each pie sports a design motif, and Ms. Braun credits her son with that. “He is an artist, like his father,” she said. Ms. Braun’s husband, Roby, casts and sculpts dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures for international museums with his company, Cycad. “Miles is so detail-oriented,” she said, describing the leaf design on the apple caramel pie, the chicken on — what else — the chicken pie, and more.
The mother-and-son team are currently cranking out around 100 pies a week. “I expect it will be much more after Memorial Day,” said Ms. Braun. Most of them find their way to the shelves at the Seafood Shop in Wainscott, Provisions in Sag Harbor, Stuart’s Seafood and Jack’s Coffee in Amagansett, and Schmidt’s Produce in Southampton. Ms. Braun has just received word that the pop-up Whole Foods Market coming to Wainscott this month would carry her wares as well.
This opened the conversation to the future growth of the company. Ms. Braun visualizes a frozen line of pies, and grocery versions of her fillings and dry mixes as well. The pies retail at $25 to $35 — worth every penny, she said: “These pies are not cheap to make. And the price reflects our ingredients.”
“Is it diet food? No,” she said, laughing. “You can’t take all the good stuff out of a pie to make it healthy, it would taste awful. We have a cookie crust on some of the pies, it’s super-buttery and decadent. But it’s clean, it’s all natural.” She shrugged. “Organic is just a price point now. One hundred percent natural is the way to go.”